I didn’t like David Foster Wallace’s writing. I wish I did. No, I ardently, obsessively adored it. I believed Wallace to be an unparalleled genius and that rarest of things, a male author with a heart so empathetic for the downtrodden, the addicted, the suffering, and the sorrowful that, as I used to tell my skeptical friends, “No, it’s like he is maybe sort of a feminist. He even hated how sexist John Updike was! He wrote a whole essay about it!” I was in love with the work, and I was in love with the creator of the work. I knew that you should never idolize anyone. And yet I was the literary equivalent of a Swiftie -- everything I wrote and thought about writing was filtered through the lens of whether Wallace would approve.
All of this hero worship occurred while he was still with us. Until the aftermath of 2008 suicide at the age of 46, I believed Wallace to be what the media surrounding him reinforced: a kind man with a solemn spirit, someone whose extraordinary intelligence resulted in mammoth-sized books and essays which explored nothing less than the human condition, someone who believed fiction was about “what it means to be a fucking human being,” a sort of cultural shaman who took on the pains of modern life and used words to try to expel or at least explain that anguish to all of us, so we could bear it with more fortitude and grace.
“I sometimes wonder whether my only purpose in life is to put my penis in as many vaginas as possible,” David Foster Wallace -- the real Wallace, not the one I made up in my infatuated head over the years -- wrote to his best friend and fellow novelist Jonathan Franzen after also talking about how the women at his readings were what he referred to as “audience pussy.” When Franzen began speaking of the David Foster Wallace he knew better than almost anyone, I hated him at first. It was easy to dismiss Franzen as jealous. He was considered a whiny ass who wrote some acclaimed novels but suffered from the fatal illness known as Pretentious White Male Author Syndrome, of which we all know there is no known cure. (Side note: I would later grow to appreciate Franzen once I hit my late 30s, and begrudgingly come to realize that he was a tremendously skilled chronicler of the inherent disappointment in expectations vs reality and the muddled, shambolic mess of adulthood. He is like dark chocolate to me -- unappealing and inedible as an unformed young person, a bittersweet and rich gem as a grown woman. I fuck with you Franzen, but ya know you are still kind of full of yourself, bae). But I knew my Saint Dave narrative was really cooked when another writer I worshiped started telling her truth about things she endured during her intimate relationship with Wallace.
Her name is Mary Karr. Author of several memoirs, including the seminal [The Liars Club]. A firecracker of a person, seemingly congenitally unable to suffer fools. A beautiful poet. A woman who survived a difficult childhood and addiction. And a woman who says she was also abused by David Foster Wallace. A woman whom I believe with my whole heart. Amongst the behaviors she reported Wallace engaged in during their romantic relationship: pushed her out of a moving car, threw a coffee table at her, tried to get a man in Alcoholics Anonymous with him to kill her ex-husband, and as she tweeted years after a hagiographic biography about Wallace was released: “ (he) tried to buy a gun. Kicked me. Climbed up the side of my house at night. Followed my son age 5 home from school. Had to change my number twice, and he still got it. Months and months it went on.”
I will now confess something extraordinarily embarrassing: when I learned this information, I cried. Like, headachy weeping for days. As time went on, I came to realize that, as a child who was abandoned by many family members at a young age, books and writers had come to represent an imaginary family of sorts to me. Even several years into adulthood, I retained blind, desperate allegiance to people I had never met simply because of their particular, peculiar, marvelous, and miraculous ability to touch my loneliness. I realized after Karr’s brave testimony that I had naively and unconsciously conflated artistic aptitude with moral infallibility (i.e., “this person writes so beautifully, how can they engage in anything of true ill intent?”) and that this erroneous belief was as deeply held as that of any devoted practitioner to a contradictory and ultimately suffocating religion. In other words, I had to grow up. I had to put art in its proper place, and to see its practitioners as fractured and fallible and, yes, in the case of Wallace, capable of great harm.
I still have David Foster Wallace books on my shelves. I will never be able to get rid of them, even though I also haven’t been able to pick them up in years. I don’t know where I stand on cancellation and redemption. I believe we can be redeemed. I know that firsthand from my own life experiences. Also, Wallace may well have changed fully before he died. He was married in the last years of his life, and his widow speaks highly of him. I will never know. What I do know is the hurt I believe he did cause to Mary Karr and that I’m still not ready to engage with the work that I once cherished so fervently. The authors that permanently alter our mental and emotional landscapes aren’t easily removed from our lives. They change us too. The only hope is that we can learn from them, and not perpetuate their mistakes.